Category Archives: Technology

Hacking the Planet: What Could Go Wrong?

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By Dale Lately

Source: The Baffler

You remember this science fiction story, right? Faced with the threat of extinction on a warming planet, an advanced race flies gigantic mirrors into the stratosphere to create a giant “space umbrella” that will bounce the sun’s rays back into the cosmos. But it doesn’t work. Undeterred, the race devises a huge artificial volcano to spew ash into the atmosphere, in order to create a permanent fog in the sky that will dampen the damage from the rays. That doesn’t work either. Desperately, the stricken race pours millions of tons of iron filings into the sea, hoping that it will stimulate phytoplankton to suck the warming gases out of the atmosphere….

You remember that? No, me either. That’s because it wasn’t sci-fi–the above is actually a selection of serious proposals being made to “geo-engineer” our way out of global warming. These proposals are gaining increasing political ground and regularly discussed at symposiums such as the 2014 Berlin Climate Engineering Conference. The bizarre-sounding ideas being discussed include creating giant mechanical honeycombs or seaweed farms to fertilize the oceans (through a process of carbon dioxide reduction, or CDR), and more grandiose projects such as building cloud-spewing ocean drones and space mirrors (through solar radiation management, or SRM—like a dimmer switch for the sun).

The planet hackers are getting busy. Start-ups and patents already abound–as do their creators. Nathan Myhrvold, founder of “Intellectual Ventures,” proposes a “garden hose to the sky,” which aims to fight pollution with more pollution by spewing sulfur into the stratosphere. Russ George is the guerrilla geo-engineer who thoughtfully dumped 100 tons of iron sulfate into the sea in 2012 to try and save the oceans. Lowell Wood’s previous atmospheric tinkering credits include the Star Wars program. But the idea on the SRM side currently gaining most traction seems to be that of a “Giant Sunshade,” which would simulate the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption like Pinatubo back in in 1991 by giving the stratosphere a sulfur injection to bounce back warming rays. In other words, it’s like a giant volcano in the sky. What could possibly go wrong?

Er…how about everything? A project like this risks causing vast droughts and food shortages for billions of people (mostly suffered in the developing world of course), as climatologist Alan Robock found when he made a computer model of the sulfur injections of such a “volcano on tap” in 2008. Once begun, the sulfur-spewing would have to be continuous, since cutting off the supply would cause sudden and lethal re-warming. In other words, it would be akin to putting the planet on permanent life-support. Moreover, the sky might be left forever hazy, which would of course–oh, the irony–diminish solar power.

Besides the physical risks involved, there’s also the moral hazard to consider. Just as the implied promise of a financial bailout encouraged recklessness from the banks, the idea that centuries of environmental abuse can be reversed by a few clever tweaks, a sticking-plaster for Big Oil, suggests that the party can go on forever. This line of thinking would certainly explain all the fossil fuel dollars flowing into geo-engineering. One of the first formal gatherings for the movement was convened in 2008 by BP’s chief scientist Steve Koonin, while CDR start-up Carbon Engineering has backing from the Canadian tar sands business. And think tank American Enterprise Initiative, generously funded by the oil sector, launched a department in 2008 called the Geoengineering Project. Ever the entrepreneur, Nathan Myhrvold had the bright idea of using the yellow sulfur waste from tar sand extraction to shield the sun so we can go on polluting forever. Party on!

This is magical thinking par excellence: wreck the planet for everybody, and then turn up the global air-con. The planet hacking men (and they are mostly men) represent techno-evangelism raised to unprecedented new levels–a macho belief in humanity’s right and ability to tame nature, rather than our responsibility to learn to live within our natural limits. Talk is already moving from “if” to “how,” from discussing testing to discussing governance, and GE may supersede GM as the next bogey of the environmental Left. Frankencrops will seem like small fry compared to a Frankenplanet, one where glacial melt may be lessened by SRM, but where acidification, deforestation, and species obliteration will march merrily on.

But then, do the wealthy elites supporting these schemes really care, when, as Naomi Klein points out in This Changes Everything, they’re already talking of abandoning Earth altogether? That is, of course, the logical conclusion of geo-tinkering–planet hacking awaits its cosmic Ark, an escape pod for the lucky few, just in the same way that the body hackers hope for immortality. In this comforting salvation narrative, the oil tycoons and airline moguls can watch the planet they polluted disappear from a porthole window as they sail away forever–leaving those on the ground to fend for themselves beneath, as Klein puts it, “a milky, geo-engineered ceiling gazing down on a dying, acidified sea.”

Alternatively, we could try something less gee-whizz: rather than turning down the sun for everybody on earth, we could force the fossil fuel industry to comply with emissions targets. But perhaps regulating big oil–unlike space mirrors or volcanoes in the sky–just sounds too much like science fiction.

 

Dale Lately writes about culture and communications and has contributed to the Guardian, 3:AM Magazine, OpenDemocracy, Litro and Pop Matters. His regular musings can be found at @dalelately and www.dalelately.blogspot.com.

 

Saturday Matinee: Light Years

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“Light Years” (1988) is the US version of the film “Gandahar” directed by René Laloux who previously directed the mind-bending animated sci-fi classic “Fantastic Planet”.  While the animation in Light Years is of lesser quality than Fantastic Planet, it’s just as imaginative and ambitious in its depiction of an alien world. Its plot centers on the bioengineering based civilization of Gandahar who, with the help of a mutant race they created struggle for survival against an army of automatons. While the French version has a superior soundtrack by Gabriel Yared, the US version does feature fine voice actors including Glenn Close, Bridget Fonda, David Johansen and Christopher Plummer as well as an intelligent screenplay adaptation by Isaac Asimov.

Monsanto Sues Maui for Direct Democracy, Launches New PR Campaign

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By Rebekah Wilce

Source: PR Watch

Residents of Maui County, Hawai’i voted on November 4 to ban the growing of genetically modified (GMO) crops on the islands of Maui, Lanai, and Molokai until scientific studies are conducted on their safety and benefits. Monsanto and Dow Chemical’s unit Mycogen Seeds have sued the county in federal court to stop the law passed by the people.

In Vermont, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA, of which Monsanto and Dow were recently listed as members) has sued the state over its law requiring GMO labels. And Monsanto has a history of suing to prevent consumer labeling regarding its products. The company sued a number of dairies in the 1990s and 2000s for labeling milk free from recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), which Monsanto developed and marketed as Posilac® (sold to Eli Lilly in 2008), the only commercially approved form. Vermont itself is no stranger to such suits. The International Dairy Foods Association sued Vermont for passing a law requiring labeling of milk containing rBGH (Monsanto wrote an amicus brief in support of the plaintiff, and GMA was a plaintiff-appellant) — and it won in federal court.

On the same day that Monsanto said it would challenge the decision of Maui’s citizens to regulate their own land and environment in court, the company also launched a new national advertising campaign as part of an effort to improve the image of the widely reviled company.

The glossy ads portray families of many cultures sitting down to eat gorgeous foods, invoking images more often seen in the pages of Saveur than in the hallways of one of the world’s largest chemical companies.

In addition to print ads in several national magazines and TV ads airing on national cable networks and several local stations in coastal cities, the campaign includes a slick new website launched in September, Discover.Monsanto.com.

The website invites questions from the public. The vast majority are skeptical, if not hostile. Others sound like they were written by Monsanto staff. Predictably, some of the hardest questions, like the one posed by Tim H., “In 2013, how much money has Monsanto spent on lobbyists in DC? What laws were these lobbyists attempting to create/amend and why?” are given short shrift.

Monsanto’s pretty TV ads target moms and millenials, according to the company’s corporate brand lead, Jessica Simmons. Monsanto has even hired a new “director of millenial engagement,” Vance Crowe, 32. He represented the company at a recent South by Southwest Eco conference in Austin, where revelations that Monsanto had paid for a panel of farmers to attend and present generated some excitement, as Tom Philpott reports in Mother Jones.

Crowe told NPR‘s “The Salt” blog, “[T]he challenge with something like SXSW Eco is that it doesn’t do anybody any good if people are so passionate that they’re yelling. The challenge is how can we enter the conversation so that people don’t feel like they have to yell to be heard?” Apparently, Crowe hopes to “enter the conversation” one party at a time. He enthusiastically describes how he and a gay colleague attended sessions on “sustainable fashion” and got invited to parties where they won fans and accolades.

Coincidentally, the front page of Discover.Monsanto.com contains, under “Here’s where we work,” a picture of corn crops being tended in Maui, with the text, “Hawaii’s unique climate allows for three to four growing seasons a year, reducing the time it takes us to develop new products. Our island roots go back more than 45 years.”

The marketing text may indicate the issue at the heart of Monsanto’s lawsuit against Maui. Those multiple growing seasons mean that “about 90 percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is genetically engineered and has been developed partially at Hawaii farms,” according to the Associated Press. Monsanto and the rest of the seed crop industry reap $146.3 million a year in sales from their activities in the state, according to a 2009 USDA report. Now Monsanto would have to substantially downsize its activity in Maui County in order to follow the new law, according to its lawsuit.

Monsanto’s new PR campaign seeks to make its brand approachable to the American consumer. Yet, with 92 percent of Americans demanding that GMO foods be labelled, according to a new Consumer Reports poll, Monsanto and its new millenial hires have their work cut out for them.

Consumer Reports recently put out a study on where GMOs are hiding in your food, including in packages labeled “natural.” You can access the report here.

Rebekah Wilce is a reporter and researcher who directs CMD’s Food Rights Network project.

Cynicism, Recession, and the Resurgence of Cyberpunk

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By Marshall Sandoval

Source: PopMatters

Human nature might be augmented and highly channeled by technology, but human nature stays the same. And that tech might actually amplify all the worst things about us too.

Cyberpunk has seen a recent resurgence in video games. Seemingly every game developer working today has a William Gibson book tucked under their arm or follows @swiftonsecurity (a satirical Twitter account that imagines a Taylor Swift consumed with cyber security). Cyberpunk video games are pervasive, including cyberpunk game jam projects on itch.io, Twine games, indie titles, and major AAA releases. All of these projects embrace cyberpunk themes and aesthetics. Observers credit the current trend to a number of cyclical and cultural factors. After talking to the indie developers behind a number of exciting cyberpunk titles at the center of this resurgence, I believe that the creators of these games are overwhelmingly inspired by the headlines in today’s newspapers.

It seems like no coincidence that these games have all appeared in a short time period following the economic recession. On the most basic level of analysis, it seems that these games may be providing a sense of escape from recent economic events. Last Life developer Sam Farmer notes, “I’m gonna go back to my film school class on Sci-Fi and Fantasy and say that it’s escapism. Horror, in general, and escapism, in particular, is often more popular in times of economic downturn, when you want to be somewhere else.”

Garrett Cooper’s Black Ice is an action game which casts the player as a hacker taking down corporate servers. Promoting the game, he’s found that cyberpunk narratives may be popular for reflecting reality as much as for providing an escape. He says, “I’ve talked to people about my game. I say, ‘All the corporations are evil.’ So they’re like, ‘Oh. So you’re talking about real life?’ I’m like, ‘No. Not exactly.’ That’s what people feel. The fantasy of being the one guy that can take something technological and turn it against the corporation.”

Games writer Austin Walker is an academic and cyberpunk superfan who sees the same throughline in these games and the literary roots of the genre. Walker says, “A key to traditional cyberpunk again and again is that there is economic inequality. We are positioning ourselves somewhere on that scale of how we feel about this stuff. Cyberpunk stories do that too. Usually they position the hero at the bottom of that; they’re usually in or near poverty.” In a time of extreme real-world inequality, cyberpunk stories locate players in a fantasy of rising up to subvert the system and taking down greedy corporations.

David Pittman’s indie project Neon Struct deals with a fictional near-future surveillance state. The game was heavily influenced by the recent leaks about actual domestic surveillance in the present day in the United States. Pittman says, “Edward Snowden’s release of NSA documents in 2013 was an essential part of the inception of Neon Struct (formerly Die Augen der Welt, or ‘The Eyes of the World’). I have strong feelings about the abuse of surveillance by the U.S. government, and I’ve known for close to a year that I wanted to make a game about it.” He’s quick to add, “Despite my own interest and leaning in the real world debate over mass surveillance, I am developing a way to introduce the story, which does not require the player character to actually leak any classified information. I don’t want to assume that the player shares my biases.” Nonetheless, it’s clear that the forthcoming project was informed by recent events.

Other examples of indie games providing commentary on and gaining inspiration from world events abound. Brigador is an isometric cyberpunk shooter with an extremely stylish trailer, and developer Jack Monahan lists a surprising influence. Monahan says, “While I’m not sure if the author would agree with the genre classification {of cyberpunk}, my brother and I both read and enjoyed (and were worried by) a book called Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham. Like William Gibson said, the future caught up to all of his writing, more or less. We basically are living in a dystopic future”. Notably, Monahan made these statements before the recent military-style urban clashes in Ferguson, Missouri. The aforementioned Last Life is shaped by real world advances in medicine and philosophical debates about transhumanism. Matt Conn is seeking to expand LGBT representation in the games space with the cyberpunk RPG R.O.M. He says, “Because I did GaymerX and prior to that I did a startup that was very successful and then crashed. Seeing how all that happened, I feel like I have an interesting perspective of the tech scene and the LGBT rights scene.” These varied examples show the differing events influencing today’s cyberpunk boom.

As strongly as these games are influenced by the socio-political climate, it is reductionist to say this is the only thing bringing cyberpunk back into prominence. Again, Austin Walker says, “It’s tempting to just say, ‘Oh that’s happening again. We’re getting concerned again about things like privatization and inequality.’ I think that’s part of it. I don’t know if I’d be comfortable saying, ‘This is the one reason why’”. Many developers also noted the power of nostalgia as a reason for the influx of cyberpunk games. Alex Preston a developer behind Hyper Light Drifter says, “I think my generation is coming into its own, creatively, and we have a fondness for these themes and ideas. A lot of us grew up with books, films, and games that touched on these themes, and it bleeds through in our creative work. I think nostalgia is a powerful force.”

Likewise, Brendan Chung, creator of ‘90s-influenced hacker game Quadrilateral Cowboy has noticed the cyclical nature of cyberpunk themes. He says, “My guess is that the people who grew up fiddling with old PC tech are now at an age where they now have the skillset and financial means to make their own games. Now that we can make games, we’re making things that harken back to one of the things that got us interested in games in the first place.” Nostalgia for ‘80s and ‘90s cyberpunk is another likely force bringing these kinds of games back to the games market.

Additionally, I kept hearing indie developers suggest their own outlook about the state of the world today is extremely bleak. Conn says, “On a more philosophical note, this is a way of writing about the future we kind of want to see. Even if it’s dystopian or dark. I think that for a lot of us, it’s very scary going into the future.” A similarly grim outlook is shared by Monahan. He says, “I think the dystopic elements of cyberpunk point to a certain cynicism that things aren’t going to get any better. Human nature might be augmented and highly channeled by technology, but human nature stays the same. And that tech might actually amplify all the worst things about us too.” Monahan also sees this cynicism in the nostalgia that drives the cyberpunk resurgence. He adds, “So much great work from the ‘80s was in a similar vein. I think of Snake Plissken’s deadpan response to news that the president’s plane has gone down: ‘President of what?’. There’s a disillusionment from the classic era of cyberpunk that makes a revival now seem fairly natural, I think.” Natural or not, the revival is in full force, and it’s becoming a strong and subversive undercurrent in the indie games space.

The Birth of the Time-Motion Human

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By Dale Lately

Source: The Baffler

In a darkened room, a woman lies watched by an infra-red camera as she sleeps. It monitors her breathing, her movements, the flicker of her eyelids. Some hours later it stings her with a painful electric shock. She wakes, tumbles out of bed and into the restroom, whereupon a chip installed in her toothbrush tracks her arm movements. She’s photographed, silently, every thirty seconds. As she sets off in the morning her location is logged and data is streamed on the steps she takes. Her pulse and calorie count are recorded and sent to unseen observers. She has a dog at her side. The dog’s data is logged as well.

Such a tableau would be the envy of any futuristic dictatorship. In fact, the devices outlined above are all available on the consumer market now, for voluntary use. The impetus towards tracking our lives with smartphones, apps and stats represents a massive growth area into which companies like Jawbone, MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Runtastic, MapMyRun, Foodzy, GymPact, and Fitocracy are flooding. Alongside the Nike+ Fuelband, there’s the popular Fitbit Flex, a wristband that counts the steps you take by day and the number of times you stir in your sleep. There are smart cups to track what you drink and wristbands programmed to give you electric shocks for not achieving your goals. There’s even a “Fitbit for your vagina” in the form of the KGoal Smart Kegel Trainer—a Kickstarter project designed to track kegels, exercises for women’s pelvic floor muscles to improve childbirth and continence, and for helping them to achieve a better “clench strength” via Bluetooth.

With all this biofeedback now available on our phones, the act of walking, living and breathing can—at least to the “datasexuals” who embrace it—be an ongoing project with limitless potential for improvement. But might such potential also lead to a kind of “Taylorism within”? Applying scientific management to twentieth century business created a workforce optimized for maximum efficiency. Likewise, life-tracking is encouraging us to internalize this dream by optimizing ourselves. Rather than a tool for liberation, we’re using the tech, in other words, to tune our lives for maximum “productivity.”

Perhaps none of this should seem surprising for a consumer society that drives on anxiety. If bad breath had to be invented as a disease mouthwash would help to cure a century ago, now the Quantified Self movement suggests we must live in permanent beta, to aim not just at maintaining ourselves but to become “better than well.” And so, Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done and websites like Lifehacker help to turn our lives into a series of sanctioned tasks and goals, where one must carry a “Surprise Journal” to find areas for self-improvement in one’s life, and sleep comes in the form of “power” naps. There’s the Lumo Back, a gizmo that monitors the tricky process of sitting in a chair, while the Narrative wearable camera snaps your life twice a minute. Time management lessons are now available for kids, while the iPotty seems to give toddlers the message that they shouldn’t take their eyes off a screen even when satisfying the most basic of human needs.

Silicon Valley, naturally, is more than happy to export the mantra of ongoing product optimization to our bodies: life-hacking fanatics talk of “upgrades” and “body hacks,” with often obsessive results. In a Financial Times article that marked a mainstream recognition of the movement, Tim Ferriss–author of The 4-Hour Body–claimed that he could teach people how to lose weight without exercising, work on two hours’ sleep, and have a fifteen-minute orgasm, while bio-hacker Dave Asprey was adamant that he’s made himself twenty years younger and forty IQ points smarter through life-tracking and smart pills (“I’ve rewired my brain,” he said). All of this task management can become a considerable task in itself, leading to the piling up of Catch 22 ironies—like the fact that developers are now working on smartphone apps to solve the problem of people spending too much time on their smartphones.

Luckily, some are questioning the use of intimate monitoring devices in our lives. The information asymmetry provided by the emergent “Internet of Things” may create a class of uninsurable people, while ”digital Taylorism”—the tracking and tagging of workers like cattle—has been roundly criticized as it has begun to emerge at companies like Amazon. What’s disquieting about the popularization of life-tracking is the voluntary desire to become “time-motion humans,” to subject ourselves to a self-imposed surveillance state. “Track everything. Track your entire day—wherever you go,” says the website for the LumoBack. “VESSYL AUTOMATICALLY KNOWS AND TRACKS EVERYTHING YOU DRINK,” the Vessyl “smart mug” warns us in stark capitals. And once we’ve volunteered for this intimate biological scrutiny, we’re keen to publicize the results—using tools like the Withings scale, which threatens to broadcast our weight gains to our Twitter followers as “encouragement.” Self-Improvement Macht Frei.

Since the invention of the forceps we’ve been introducing machinery into our bodies to improve our lives (the aforementioned KGoal is actually based on a biofeedback device from the 1940s by Dr. Arnold Kegel), and undoubtedly many of these trackers are helping to make people healthier. But life tracking also comes from a certain ideological background, one that denigrates macro-interventions in our lives (nationalized health care) in favor of individual micro-solutionism (becoming our own gym instructors and fitness trainers).

We’re living in an entrepreneurial model of humanity, a vision of human beings as start-ups, where unfitness or obesity are viewed as “bugs” to be fixed rather than as products of an economy based on long hours and precarious work. Daily exercise has always been an individual responsibility, but sharing our biofeedback via social media encourages people to compete like businesses, vying for better health scores with the personal data that makes us special. (Flex boasts that it reflects “your stats, not any average Joe’s.”) Here we can all be Superman—“Join over 141,000 other people who want to discover their inner superhero,” urges website Superheroyou—while, back in the complex, unquantifiable real world, we often struggle to maintain control over the most basic facts of our finances and job prospects.

The Quantified Self literature is full of such fantasizing. It all treats the body as a fun challenge, a puzzle to be solved. We see this in the current trend towards adding game-like features to the process of life tracking, which leads to some quite startlingly intimate results (“Spreadsheets,” an app that promises to gamify your sex life, has the user get on the bed and talk dirty to a computer). Even antenatal workouts aren’t immune: the KGoal promises gamification in forthcoming product updates for those who fancy comparing their pelvic thrust scores to those of their peers.

The friendly rivalry that has always been a part of amateur fitness starts to look less inspiring, and more controlling, when it’s built into the architecture of smartphones and social media. It’s more like a crowd-sourced version of what philosopher Michel Foucault termed “Biopower,” the control over our bodies wielded by states and their institutions. But in this version, it’s not the institutions; we control ourselves, and each other.

As more and more aspects of our lives are seen as legitimate targets for intrusion by technology, the gaze inevitably falls on the newly born. Start-ups like Sproutling, Owlet, and Mimo are springing up to replace old-fashioned baby monitors with comprehensive, round-the-clock surveillance (temperature, pulse, breathing, position, room ambience) as well as all the attendant data crunching. These infants may be the first humans to grow up entirely in the lens of machines, with the process of rearing having been refashioned as a high-tech, high-maintenance project, requiring endless inputs from both parent and child alike. They will be the first “time-motion babies”: faster, happier, more productive, in the words of Radiohead’s Ok Computer.

Will they really be happier, versed as they will be, since birth, in the techniques of maximizing their sleep, optimizing their nutrients, and tracking the number of steps they walk? It seems doubtful, but then, it’s impossible to really tell when we talk about happiness—even Silicon Valley hasn’t worked out how to put a number on that.

 

Dale Lately writes about culture and communications and has contributed to the Guardian, 3:AM Magazine, OpenDemocracy, Litro and Pop Matters. His regular musings can be found at @dalelately and www.dalelately.blogspot.com.

Franco Berardi on the Digital Colonization of Human Experience

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By Franco Berardi

Source: Adbusters

The Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica was essentially a process of symbolic and cultural submission.

The “superiority” 
of the colonizers lay on the operational effectiveness of their technical production. The colonization destroyed the cultural environment in which indigenous communities had been living for centuries: the alphabetic technology, the power of the written word overwhelmed, jeopardized and finally superseded the indigenous cultures. The conquistadors re-coded the cultural universe of nowadays Mexico and Central America.

Before the arrival of the Spanish invaders Malinche (Malinalli in Nahuatl language, Marina for the Spaniards), the daughter
 of a noble Aztec family, was given away as 
a slave to passing traders after her father died and her mother remarried. By the time Cortés arrived, she had learned the Mayan dialects spoken in the Yucatan while still understanding Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. As a youth she was given as tribute again, this time to the invaders.

She became the lover of Cortés and accompanied him as interpreter. She translated the words exchanged by Cortés and Moctezuma, king of the Aztec population of Tenochtitlan, and she translated the conqueror’s words when he met crowds of indigenous persons. She translated for Nahuatl-speaking people the words of Christian conquerors and of Christian priests. The Christian message melted with pre-colonisation mythologies, and the modern Mexican culture emerged. She and Cortés had a child, Martín, the first Mexican. She betrayed her own people by linking with the invaders. By the moral point of view, however, she owed nothing to her own people who had sold her into slavery, and treated her as a servant. She betrayed the conquerors, too, though they did not realize it as such.

Malinche is the ultimate symbol of the end of a world, and also the symbol of the formation of a new semiotic and symbolic space. Only when you are able to see the collapse as the end of a world, can a new world be imagined. Only when you are free from hope (which is the worst enemy of intelligence) can you start seeing a new horizon of possibility. This is the lesson that Malinche is teaching us.

DEMOCRACY

On 31 October 2011, George Papandreou announced his government’s intentions to hold a referendum for the acceptance of the terms of a Eurozone bailout deal. He wanted the Greek people to decide if the diktat of the financial class that was strangling Greek society would be accepted or rejected. Overnight, the elected Prime Minister of Greece was obliged to resign. In the very place where it was invented and named twenty-five centuries ago, democracy was finally cancelled. It will never again come to life. Financial abstraction has swallowed the destiny of billions of people. European workers’ salaries have been halved in the last ten years and unemployment and precariousness are on the rise. Meanwhile, profits skyrocket.

WAR

The Eurasian continent is heading toward a proliferation of fragmentary conflict. At the same time, the infinite war launched by Cheney and Bush has paved the way to the establishment of the Caliphate. In Japan, the Prime Minister travels the world looking for allies against China. In India, a racist mass murderer (neoliberal of course) has been elected Prime Minister. In Europe, a Euro-Russian war is in the making at the Ukrainian border. In Ferguson, Missouri, another racialized killing reveals the American police state and the poverty industrial complex — two million homeless in the US and counting. In Gaza, Israel bombards the world’s largest open air prison and blames the victims, most of them children, for dying while the world looks on. In Northern Africa, Western powers prepare for the next season of Gaddafi blowback. In Liberia, Ebola fans the flames of civil and regional war, one bleeding eyeball at a time. In Mexico, a momentary silence shrouds the bloodiest drug war humanity has ever known, with cartels ranking among the wealthiest corporations.

While capitalism will continue to thrive thanks to massive slavery and eco-catastrophe, the next 20 years will be marked by the clash between financial abstraction and biofascism. A social, cognitive breakdown is estranging the masses from the body, so the decerebrated body is taking the form of aggression. Those who have been lost in the competition react under the banners of aggressive identification. We can even see fascism revived by the vengeful spirit of the dispossessed.

BIO-FINANCIAL POWER

Nation states are over, stripped by the global machine
 of finance, computation and all-pervading behavioral Big Data algorithms. Global corporations are replacing nation states as holders of power. We now embrace the first stages of the automation of mind, language and emotions … the architecture of bio-financial power. Power, in fact, is no longer political or military. It is based more and more on the penetration of techno-linguistic automatisms into the sphere of language. Soon, life will be based on the automation of cognitive activity. Who cares if the US military machine is running on empty because of Bush’s self-defeating strategy — it’s a remnant of geopolitical thinking now dead.

THE CIRCLE

Mediocre as it is, Dave Eggers’s novel 
The Circle is a metaphor for the relation between technology, communication, emotion and power. “The Circle” is the name of the most powerful corporation 
in the world, a sort of conglomerate of Google, Facebook, Paypal and YouTube. Three men lead the company: Stockton 
is a financial shark, Bayley is a utopian and Ty Gospodinov is the project’s hidden mastermind.

The main character of the book is Mae, a young woman hired by The Circle during “the Completion,” the final phase in the implementation of TrueYou, a program intended to enforce the recording of every instant of life for pervasive, ceaseless sharing. Mae becomes the corporation’s spokesperson, the face that appears every day on the infinite channels of The Circle’s television network — the ambassador of the new credo.

The Circle is all about the utter
 capture of human attention: ceaseless communication, mandatory friendliness and creation of a new neediness — the obsessive need to express and share. One may remark that Eggers is simply re-enacting Orwell more than 60 years after the publishing of 1984. That’s true, but in the final pages of the novel, Eggers goes further than Orwell, when Ty exposes the transhuman potency of the totalitarian nightmare.

In the last scene of the novel, the inventor and founder of The Circle manages to covertly meet Mae, the newbie seducing
 the global audience. He has lost control of his own creature, the project he originally conceived, and is deprived of all power in its unstoppable self–deployment.

“I did not intend any of this to happen. And it’s moving so fast. I didn’t picture a world where Circle membership was mandatory, where all government and all life was channeled through one network … there used to be the option of opting out. But now that’s over. Completion is the end. We are closing the circle around everyone. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.”

The automaton cannot be stopped, as even the creator himself becomes overpowered by his own invention: the circle of continuous attention, the circle of perfect transparence of everybody to everybody, the circle of total power and of total impotence.

PLEASURE, AFFECTION AND EMPATHY

At the beginning of the 21st century we are in a position that is similar to the position of Malinche: the conqueror is here, peaceful or aggressive, functionally superior, unattainable, incomprehensible. The bio-info automaton is taking shape from the connection between electronic machines, digital languages and minds formatted in such a way to comply with the code. The automaton’s flow of enunciation emanates a connective world that the conjunctive codes cannot interpret, a world that is symbolically incompatible with the social civilization that was the outcome of five centuries of Humanism, Enlightenment and Socialism.

The automaton is the reification of the networked cognitive activity of millions of semio-workers around the globe. Only if they become compatible with the code, the program, can semio-workers enter in the process of networking.

This implies the de-activation of old, subconsciously engrained, modes of communication and perception (compassion, empathy, solidarity, ambiguousness and irony), paving the way to the assimilation of the conscious organism with the digital automaton.

Will the general intellect be able to disentangle itself from the automaton? Can consciousness act on neural evolution? Will pleasure, affection, empathy find a way to re-emerge? Will we translate into human language the connective language of the automated meaning-making machine buzzing and buzzing in our heads?

These are questions that only 
Malinche can answer, opening to the incomprehensible other, betraying her people and reinventing language in order to express what can not be said.

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition. He writes about the condition of media, mental breakdown
 and information technology within post-industrial capitalism. His next book, Heroes, dedicated to the suicidal wave provoked by financial nihilism, will be out in the first months of 2015.

Social Schizophrenia, Social Depression: What does TV tell us about America?

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wash_dees

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Dangerous Minds

The difference between what we experience and what we’re told we experience creates a social schizophrenia that leads to self-destructive attitudes and behaviors.

What can popular television programs tell us about the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) of our culture and economy?

It’s an interesting question, as all mass media both responds to and shapes our interpretations and explanations of changing times. It’s also an important question, as mass media trends crystallize and express new ways of understanding our era.

Those who shape our interpretation of events also shape our responses.  This of course is the goal of propaganda: Shape the interpretation, and the response predictably follows.

As a corporate enterprise, mass media’s goal is to make money—the more the better—and that requires finding entertainment products that attract and engage large audiences.  The products that change popular culture are typically new enough to fulfill our innate attraction to novelty—but this isn’t enough. The product must express an interpretation of our time that was nascent but that had not yet found expression.

We can understand this complex process of crystallizing and giving expression to new contexts as one facet of the politics of experience.

The Politics of Experience

It is not coincidental that the phrase politics of experience was coined by a psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, for the phrase unpacks the way our internalized interpretation of experience can be shaped to create uniform beliefs about our society and economy that then lead to norms of behavior that support the political/economic status quo.

Here’s how Laing described the social ramifications in Chapter Four of his 1967 book, The Politics of Experience:

“All those people who seek to control the behavior of large numbers of other people work on the experiences of those other people. Once people can be induced to experience a situation in a similar way, they can be expected to behave in similar ways. Induce people all to want the same thing, hate the same things, feel the same threat, then their behavior is already captive – you have acquired your consumers or your cannon-fodder.”

For Laing, the politics of experience is not just about influencing social behavior – it has an individual, inner consequence as well:

“Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.”

How the media shapes our interpretation affects not just our beliefs and responses, but our perceptions of self and our role in society. If the media’s interpretation no longer aligns with our experience, the conflict can generate self-destructive behaviors.

In other words, mass media interpretations can create a social schizophrenia that can lead to self-destructive attitudes and behaviors.

Social Analysis of TV

By its very nature as a mass shared experience, popular entertainment is fertile ground for social analysis.

Here’s a common example: what does a child learn about conflict resolution if he’s seen a thousand TV programs in which the “hero” is compelled to kill the “bad guy” in a showdown? What does that pattern suggest, not just about the structure of drama, but about the society that creates that drama?

Analyzing entertainment has been popular in America since the 1950s, if not earlier.  The film noir of the 1950s, for example, was widely deemed to express the angst of the Cold War era.  Others held that the rising prosperity of the 1950s enabled the populace to explore its darker demons—something the hardships and anxieties of the Depression did not encourage.

Many believe the Depression gave rise to screwball comedies and light-hearted entertainment featuring the casually wealthy precisely because these were escapist antidotes to the grinding realities of the era.

Even television shows that were denigrated as superficial in their own time (for example, Bewitched in the 1960s) can be seen as politically inert but subconsciously potent expressions of profound social changes: the “witch” in Bewitched is a powerful young female who is constantly implored by her conventional husband to conform to all the bland niceties of a suburban housewife, but she finds ways to rebel against these strictures.

Laing saw the potential conflict between what we experience and how we’re told to interpret that experience not just in social terms but in psychiatric terms: such splits open a gulf that can lead to a form of schizophrenia.

Diagnosing Our Disease with TV

What can we make of the popular TV series of the present era? What do they say, beneath the surface, about American society?

I contend that popular TV expresses three key aspects of U.S. society and economy that are at odds with the core idealized values espoused in civic classes and the media. The three idealized values are:

1.  America is a meritocracy—selections, admissions, etc., are based on the candidates’ merits

2.  Anyone can get ahead if they get an education and work hard

3.  America is the wealthiest nation on earth in terms of opportunity, fairness and capital

TV expresses three aspects that confound these idealized values:

1.  Life is a game in which the winner takes all

2.  The opportunity to “get ahead” via conventional means—getting educated, working hard, etc.—is a joke; only those who skirt conventions and the law get rich

3.  Life is a tortuous endurance course where those in charge demand the cruel and the impossible

Winner-Take-All Talent Shows

Let’s start with the genre that has been a dominant force in American TV since the 2000s: the winner-take-all talent show (reality and game shows).

The long-running Survivor series, for example, was a winner-take-all contest of physical prowess and political guile, while the many programs staging singing/dancing contests (American Idol, etc.) put entertainment skills to the competitive test.  A wide range of other entries stage competitions in cooking, entrepreneurship, losing weight, negotiating obstacle courses, and so on.

What interpretations of our experience do these highly competitive winner-take-all reality shows promote?

We could start with the fact that the stars (other than the hosts/judges) are apparently ordinary “every man/woman” Americans, i.e. people not unlike us.  Watching them, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine ourselves on stage, in the kitchen, etc., trying to impress the judges with our talents. It’s easy to identify with the contestants.

These shows enable us to vicariously experience the fantasy that we, too, could be on national TV and could win the accolades of the judges and fans and be the winner who takes it all.

This natural empathy with the temporarily famous with whom we can vicariously share the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat is clearly tapping a deep cultural desire to taste celebrity and the implied financial rewards of winning in an increasing winner-take-all society/economy.

Could the financial/political marginalization of the average citizen and the widening gulf between the typical household and those at the top of the fame/wealth pyramid have something to do with this fascination for winner-take-all competitions on the public stage?

Since there have been game shows on TV for decades, it could be argued that this proliferation of winner-take-all contests is nothing new. But this fails to account for the difference between a game show in which the correct answer is a fact and the subjective votes of judges, other players and the audience that count in winner-take-all contests.

I would argue that this recent explosion of competitions (“modern gladiator,” anyone?) is an expression of deeply held shared cultural values: we accept that ours is a highly competitive society, and that it is becoming even more so as the top “winners” skim the vast majority of the winnings (media visibility, wealth, adulation, social status. etc.), leaving a few morsels for the top 5% and nothing but crumbs for the bottom 95%.

But these TV programs also project the fantasy that our fight-to-the-figurative-death society is still a meritocracy—the best guy/gal wins, as judged by “experts” (or celebrities claiming expertise; the judges’ expertise is structured to be unassailable, just like all the other “experts” in our society).

But if we can’t win it all on merit, there is an alternative way to win: display superior political guile or greater popularity with the audience. (Interestingly, this echoes the coliseum audiences of the late Roman era, who also had some sway over who lived to fight another day on the choreographed battlefield below.)

Perhaps this helps explain our collective obsession with celebrity and the many measures of popularity available to everyone now—Instagram, Facebook likes, Twitter followers (for sale in lots of 10,000), Klout scores, and so on.

In other words, as success in the real world grows increasingly distant, vicariously competing and “winning it all” becomes very compelling. Rather than deal with the vast injustices of our system, we cling to the idealized norm that meritocracy matters, even as “winning” in real life is increasingly a game of cronyism, guile, gaming the system, misrepresenting the truth, etc.

And so we thrill to these play-acting displays of meritocracy in action, as it confirms our cultural value system that that despite the predations of Wall Street and Washington, merit still counts.

And when all else fails, we have a fallback source of identity and “winning”—our popularity. And if we don’t have enough of our own, then we can share vicariously in the popularity of TV show winners and celebrities who have reached the pinnacle.

This is the core message of an interesting and erudite half-hour talk on celebrity given by Games of Thrones actor Jack Gleeson:

“During a recent visit to the Oxford Union, Gleeson took the opportunity to dismantle the ‘religious hysteria’ of celebrity worship with an appropriately epic rant, breaking down the economic, psychological, and sociological catalysts for public reverence of celebrities and their negative impact on society as a whole.”

Gleeson draws upon a number of intellectual sources (Weber, Baudrillard, et al.) in his discussion of the contemporary culture of celebrity, and concludes that celebrity fills the void left when development of an authentic self is stunted.

The parallel with Laing’s “lost self” is striking.

In effect, when the opportunities for developing an authentic self have been reduced to popularity, public visibility and the status that flows from these forms of recognition, then the worship of celebrity and the aching desire for a moment in the spotlight become rational substitutes for a True Self.

As these wispy contingencies can never form an authentic selfhood, even those who do “win” the competition for celebrity are ultimately dissatisfied and disillusioned.

My conclusion: the popularity of competitive winner-take-all TV programs reflects the paucity of opportunities for selfhood and the substitution of celebrity worship for the difficult task of forging an independent identity in a society that marginalizes all but the top players.

If this isn’t a form of cultural schizophrenia, then what exactly is it? The claim that this is all just good clean fun is absurd, as is the claim that it’s perfectly healthy to sacrifice one’s identity in a competition for recognition that 99.9% of us are sure to lose.

Treading water in the stream

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yun_2729

By Chris Arkenberg

Source: URBEINGRECORDED

I haven’t posted much here in a while and, honestly, I don’t know if I have an audience anymore. You gotta feed the beast or it’ll just go gorge elsewhere at the unlimited trough of spankulation that is the Internet. It’s easier to tweet, and now there’s Ello which hasn’t yet found its center of gravity or true genus locii to root down a thriving community. But it’s refreshing to post more than 140 char without the expectation of serious long-form journeys. And I don’t use Facebook so Ello at least offers some potential to have an intellectual cohort that won’t rat-hole into that heady blend of extremism and uncritical non-thinking that seems to be coded directly into the DNA of Disgracebook. So consider this post my sort of Fakebook personal rant…

But then, I’m not sure I have a lot to say these days. Partly, I do so much of this sort of thing at work where the audience is internal. The content is fairly narrow but still insightful. Not the broad random walks through techno-behaviorology that I’m inclined to pursue here. Partly, on another axis, the Twitters and the constant streams of the technoverse and geopolity have got me a bit swirly, like the inertia of information is too great to adequately slow down and process into some sort of theory. The fascination with the stream is at the expense of any fascination with the particulars of life, like it’s all moving too fast and I’m being entrained to be little more than a relay node in the network. Click, retweet, copy-past, post. A servant to the memes, like apes collared to silicon just to grind out more 1’s and 0’s.

So much of the stream seams meaningless – fleeting glimpses, spikes of outrage, stories about things and events that will be wiped from the collective memory within a week. And maybe that’s the point, to bring all the mundane details to light, to share the bits with each other, to fully become the eyes of the world, in witness of it all. But then, if I really think about it, it’s appalling how many resources, how much energy, how much labor born on the backs of the impoverished, how much of this all goes to keeping the platters spinning and the switches switching and the rare earth’s rare-earthing, across global data centers sucking down megawatts to make sure we archive every random bleating of the global mind. To a post-psychedelic techno-futurist like myself, it’s a bit confusing to feel at odds with the marvel of it all.

I can’t remember the source but this phrase about digital transformation really stuck with me: that it’s emulsifying entire industries. Which underlines that there’s very real import to the network spankulation, that we have some obligation to roll the dung ball of modernity around and around beneath the Sun, to check it for deformations that might drive truly dangerous emulsifications. We can snicker at the death of old industries but what about the demise of comfort or wellness or nutrition or the oft-anticipated end of the state… Are we really ready for this degree of transformation? So I’m left with a crutch of faith that the stream is, on balance, a positive tool to keep us all engaged with the Great Work of unfolding the possible with some integrity, without destroying more than we create. That the relentless bleating of sheep is what keeps the shepherds attentive and considerate, and that the global mind helps us better evolve the animal within towards something more tenable than base self-preservation, something much holier than religion, something much more wise than science.

It’s a lot to put on a stream, I know, but maybe having a degree of faith is what keeps us swimming, lest we give in to the rushing depths and fall like stones, inert and silent.